


Lavender and Oakmoss

by LittleMagpie



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Character manipulation, Dark Vampire Shenanigans, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Funky Consent, Gender Dysphoria, Gore, M/M, Multi, Sex-adjacent shenanigans, Trans Jonah Magnus, Vampires, death-adjacent shenanigans, tongue biting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 06:13:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28346676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleMagpie/pseuds/LittleMagpie
Summary: He was not dead, as evidenced by the fact that he was clearly moving and breathing; the other fact was that he had been dead, and those were the only two things of which he was incontrovertibly certain. Everything else seemed nastily up in the air, a question to which Jonah had no answer.A Secret Santa 2020 gift for Caz! Merry Christmas, friend!
Relationships: Jonah Magnus/Barnabas Bennett
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Lavender and Oakmoss

  
  


Jonah lay still in the crumpled sheets, his head tipped back in pillows long-since deflated, as his senses drifted with glacial slowness back up out of the endless watery dark. He felt distant, far away from his body, as if the places where his skin ought to be had been replaced by something like the sound of summer cicadas: a simmering, all-consuming singing, the hum of a thousand cells and systems each trying to communicate with each other, impulses firing and missing over and over again in an endless relay. 

His eyes were open, though, his vision the last thing that had gone and the first to return, though everything was hazy, indistinct, almost amniotic as it rocked him slowly back up into clarity. As it recalled its duty, his nose was suddenly, miserably sensitive, and now it was filled with a wild effluence of blood, the low and grubby stench of it half-dried in great quantity. With it came the sour, thin chemical reek of spent adrenaline baking out of his flesh like some foul perfume. His tongue tasted like a handful of copper coins, and his eyes felt like they had been sanded, each roll and shift of focus rasping their tacky air-dried surfaces almost audibly in their orbits. Had they been open all this time? He thought disapprovingly that at least the man who had torn out his throat might have had the courtesy to close them. Rude of him to leave Jonah staring up into the rafters with a stupid look on his face. _Messy_ of him to leave Jonah’s gore drying stickily all over the linens. Those were _expensive_ , he thought with prim indignance. Not only that, but his blood belonged inside him, not wasted on the sheets.

It had been some time since the murder, and he was acutely aware that he was dead, in a way he hadn’t been upon the previous awakenings. Jonah chose to think of this awareness as a positive change in his situation, though a minor one.

Dead, perhaps, was not the word for it, though -- it did not explain or account for the fact that here he lay, and here he had lain, and here he would lay until he gathered the courage to move again, or the knowledge to knit what had been so rudely torn asunder. His throat had been laid open, wet red flesh in rags where teeth had found his tender pulse, and he found his face shaping itself into a moue of distaste. 

It was not so much pain as an annoyance, though he thought it would have been otherwise if he had not been on the other side of death. It took a long few moments, but he managed to fetch one fumbling hand—the left, of course, useless and unclever—up against the mess that had been made of his throat. Clumsily his cold, stiff fingers knocked gropingly against the wound in an attempt to judge the damage, and would have cried out if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was no air in his chest. That wasn’t correct. His eyes squinted, and with a concerted effort, he convinced his diaphragm, rusty and protesting with disuse, to move, forcing his lungs to open—and was immediately rewarded with the jerking hitch of a coughing fit that wrapped around his ribs with bruising, cracking force.

This provided him with enough impetus, however, to roll over onto his side, where the blood that bubbled up thick and half-clotted from the wound in his throat could drool into the tacky half-dried gore that messed the rest of the bed. He nevertheless persisted, forcing the bellows of his chest to rise and fall, and when that felt more natural, he bore with a vague sense of unease the sensation of his heart stutter-sparking back into a precarious semblance of life, its beats thready at first, slow and laborious, and then quicker, more sure, once it remembered. That was all, his body just needed to _remember_ , and he demanded this of it with determined, dispassionate insistence.

By the time he had coaxed his body back into a facsimile of its living rhythms, Jonah sat cautiously at the edge of the bed. The mattresses (ruined, he thought with a murderous, parsimonious pang) held his feet six inches off the ground, and he was bewildered by how clearly he could see every curve and hollow, every wrinkle and arch; Jonah could have counted, without drawing them closer, each freckle on thigh and knee, and beyond that he could have counted each downy hair on his calves too. 

It was true also that his skin was a new, luminous white beneath the gingery spatter of freckles now, in a way it had never before been. Ignoring the streaks of his own blood, he could look down at his nude figure, and in all the places where there ought to have been a lively flush, there was only the cold and silent hue of marble, bloodless as a statue. The curves of his small, high breasts, though they moved with the rhythm of his breathing, looked like stone carved in the likeness of a human, the pert tips of them only very faintly rosy. He wondered if his tongue looked the same, or places more intimate and tender: pale, smooth, strange. Sterile, as if life had been scrubbed from them, though the frilled and furled shapes would remain unchanged, half-sheltered beneath a nest of ginger curls, soft and vulnerable like something that belonged in the sea and not between a man’s legs.

He was not able to think too deeply about this, however, as he was seized with a sudden long wave of hunger so intense it felt as if his stomach were crushing itself up against his spine. Jonah gasped: if the wound at his throat had not been precisely pain, this was everything that had been missing. It was acute, sudden, all-consuming, breath-stealing, and he rocked forward, clumsy arms wrapping around his middle and his blood-crusted red curls swung forward around his face. A hoarse, broken keening escaped him, and all that Jonah could do was hold on as the cramping twisted his belly, ripped through him with long and terrible claws, and left him panting, wild-eyed with the force of it. 

He had never experienced such a fierce hunger, not even in his younger days, in the time between who he had been and who he had chosen to become, when money had been tight and his breeches loose on hips that had felt like their bold frame of bone might bruise its way through the thinning flesh of him. Now, years later, he had grown soft and round with wealth and luxury, and yet still he knew the grim skeleton leer of hunger by name as it bore hollowly down on him.

Jonah waited for long moments after the pain dissipated, holding his breath—it wasn’t a trial to do so, after all; though the feeling of his heart beginning to slow was strange and unpleasant, and he did not dare push the issue until it stopped, sucking in gasps like a man drowning until it resumed its lackadaisical, uninterested thumping. He swore roundly, and looked down at his traitorous body. He had not been dead so long that anything visible had changed; Jonah’s belly was still a smooth curve of ivory white below the round, pert jut of his chest, and below, two shapely legs with well-turned ankles and fine feet just this side of dainty, and he frowned—nothing seemed out of place but the wound at his throat, so why should he feel so suddenly and miserably starved?

Testing his balance, he cautiously touched toes to floor and rose from his deathbed. His head felt feather-light, but pinching his lips down into a determined line, Jonah steadied a hand on the bedstead and waited grimly for it to pass. He was not dead, as evidenced by the fact that he was clearly moving and breathing; the other fact was that he  _ had been _ dead, and those were the only two things of which he was incontrovertibly certain. Everything else seemed nastily up in the air, a question to which Jonah had no answer. He did not like it one bit—even more than that, he hated the way that hysteria seemed to be creeping up the back of his throat like bile. 

He wanted to laugh and laugh, high and jagged and broken, but he had a nasty feeling that if he started laughing he might never stop. He thought he might howl until tears rolled down his face and his ribs cracked and shattered and the fine folks who collected madmen for the asylum showed up, with their jaundiced eyes and false-soft voices, to carry him off to dark, quiet, crowded rooms filled with men and women and children waiting to die.

“Not for me, thank you kindly,” Jonah heard himself say briskly, ignoring the sound of the quaver in his voice, as he tested one step, and then another, finding his legs sound enough. Beneath his feet the wooden floors of his Edinburgh townhouse were bone-cold, and there had been no fire in the hearth for days to drive out the ghosts of winter, but Jonah could not feel the chill. Alone in his gore-streaked bedchamber, he felt the strangest feeling of unreality, as if he had come untethered from some small and vital part of himself. Perhaps he had, and he simply didn’t know it yet. 

Still, with this grim determination in mind, he went to the dressing table, where stood the bathing-pitcher and bowl, and next to it, his brush and comb, and a hand-mirror. He became quite suddenly aware, almost against his will, how much of his blood crusted in his auburn curls, how much of it had grimed and dried into rusty scabs in the folds around neck and shoulder, had run and clotted into the hollows and fine hairs beneath his arms. He did not want to think of the yawning, torn void where teeth had rent him. He was not quite ready for that.

The awareness brought with it the sudden and violent urge to fling himself into the nearest bath, to scrub his skin until every trace of his twisted end had been eliminated, to rub hot, soapy linen into every crook and crevice until his skin stung with it and roses bloomed beneath the freckled surface, but he knew with just as much certainty that there was no one here in the townhouse but him to draw a bath. The pall of silence, of rooms undisturbed and fires unlaid, lay heavy in the air, and Jonah was deeply, suddenly paranoid, suddenly _alone_. His heart beat in his ears, so loud he almost perversely wished it would shut up: how could he think when it was making such a God-damned racket, against the velvet-curtain silence of the empty house?

Still, though the water in the pitcher was cold as forgetting, he had to wash, and he set about doing so, pleasurelessly; he started first with the places of his body that were not blood-fouled, though everything in him vibrated and resonated with a need so powerful it was inescapable, to be clean and right and _normal_. He had always known, perhaps, that he would not find the end many men would, could not expect to die an old man warm in his bed surrounded by his family, but he wrestled, as he irrevocably stained the linen washcloth with blood, with a second wave of horror so deep he thought he might be sick, his stomach churning emptily around the nothing, nothing,  _ nothing _ it contained. He even retched once, a dry and unproductive gag, as he rinsed caked blood from his hair, and miserably advised his body not to repeat the attempt. It hurt, and stirred the beast of starvation living in the pits of his belly, the snaking and twisting lengths of it eagerly writhing, the thorns of its fangs testing his softest inner bits, warning, teasing. He had always thought himself a man able to bear pain, and yet somehow this seemed too much, even in anticipation.

Once he had finished washing, he stood still for a long moment, quivering minutely all over like a man who has run a miles-long foot race. His heart, however, was still moving at the same steady, slow, measured pace, his breaths even. It was as if he had done nothing, and he could not feel the cold of the room, though he stood nude and wet from his wash. Perhaps it was the chill that had him shaken, but Jonah in his heart knew better. He steeled himself, squaring slim freckled shoulders, and pulled in a deep steadying breath, looking down. 

The silver oval of the mirror gleamed on the table, flat and bright in the dim room and Jonah was seized with a sudden, atavistic loathing of the thing, a gut-wrenching instantaneous certainty that peering into his reflection would reveal something about him he did not want to confront in himself, let alone share with the eyes of others. Something dark and writhing would live there in that mirror, he was sure, something black and gleaming and  _ wet _ and foul, which dared not breach the surface of his flesh but might be revealed in the truth-telling glass—

“Do not be a fool, Magnus,” he told himself savagely after indulging in a moment of mute terror, “nothing is there in the mirror that is not plain to see on the surface!” He seized the silver handle and lifted it up as if denying himself escape. In his mind’s eye he expected with equal certainty his own pale, willful face framed in wet ginger curls, and a squirming mass of leeches, and he might have wept real tears of relief when he saw the former, though some gibbering delirium in the back of his skull expected, with each roll and twitch of his eyes, to see the latter appear beneath his skin at any moment. He scrutinized his reflection for any change for a moment that felt like forever, and yet that grim and terrified voice howled away like a silent madman locked in the prison behind his green eyes:  _ leeches! _ , hungry for blood, a black tide of them beneath the skin like they might hide beneath the surface of a still pond—

The horror was somehow lessened, not heightened, when his wild eyes settled on the red ruin that had been made of his throat. He went still, and found himself staring, head tipped, barely breathing. His jaw was smooth and pale, now clean, and his collarbones too, but everything between was a mass of torn flesh. 

The water had taken care of the dried blood, but without it, he could see clearly the structures below that ought to have been hidden by skin: the ridged tube of trachea with the ragged little hole, the gleaming pearly smoothness of muscle, the glandular tissue—Jonah stared at this, bewildered. As he watched spellbound, a thin dark freshet of blood ran out of the dark mouth of a torn vessel and traced a fresh line, like a man drawing clumsily with scarlet ink, down into the valley at the center of his chest, and he felt again the sudden bright pressure of a terrible unhinged laughter behind his tongue and pressing against his ribs. 

“Oh,” he said, and hated the tone of his voice, high and windy and faint in his own ears. He could see the clumsy inner workings of his neck, and that wave of helpless hysteria swelled in his chest, until with a hoarse little cry Jonah was able to free himself from the spell of the mirror, bringing the reflective surface down on the table with a vicious, staccato jerk of the arm. The impact felt much heavier than it ought to, and the sound of breaking glass shattered the silence of the room as the mirror splintered, broke into thousands of shards. But Jonah was not done: he raised the mirror, looked into it again, and found his pale and stare-eyed reflection glaring out of the fragmented depths that still clung to the silver frame, repeated and distorted in each cracked fragment, the lines dividing his spooked and bloodless features into a wild tessellation of colors and senseless contours.

A vindictive, wild joy seized him, and he brought the heavy silver frame down against the dressing-table again, scattering broken glass in a wild shatter, and then again, and again, in an ecstasy of uncontrolled fury. The wood cracked and splintered, the once-smooth surface scarring and pitting, and still Jonah kept going, putting his back and shoulders into the effort until not a shard of glass remained in the empty frame, until the corner of his dressing table was crushed, caved in as if by the hand of an angry god. 

And yet he was not even remotely breathless, his heart only beating at its previous measured pace, untroubled by the exertion as if he had never done anything more strenuous than stroll across a garden. A thin crescent shard of glass protruded jauntily—and painlessly—from the meat at the base of his thumb, and as Jonah watched, the glittering fragment began to lengthen as his body pushed it out, sealing the wound behind it. He dropped the hand mirror frame to the floor nervelessly and watched, lips curved in an O of shock, as the glass dropped from his flesh too, leaving a momentary wound there like a child’s oversized punctuation mark before that, too, sealed itself, and left in its wake smooth and unblemished skin.

And, horror of horrors, he could feel the same itching creep at his throat, like the slow growth of vines but sped up immensely, until the whistle of his damaged trachea suddenly was stoppered and the vessels mended and, god, it was maddening—

Jonah shuddered, and sweated, and gripped the undamaged edge of the dressing table so tightly the wood creaked in protest as the scarlet destruction of his throat knitted itself up, itching like a mad thing all the while. Long after skin had sealed and smoothed itself into place like wax, the inside still felt somehow _unsettled_ , and his fingers were drawn to the area as if by magnetism. More than anything he wanted to turn his own claw-curved hands to the fresh-healed expanse, but he forced them back down to the table, trembling as he flattened fingers and palms against the surface, held them there hard enough to feel with startling sensuousness the subtle crush and flatten of fingerprint whorl against wood grain, delivered to his senses in high-definition. 

“No,” he told himself with a thread of steel in his will, and the sound of his own voice was hard, cold, flat—then he repeated the negation again, and believed it this time. With agonizing hellish slowness, the itch subsided and left a stranger feeling in its wake: _hunger_ , which came upon him slowly at first, so slow he almost didn’t recognize it—

And then suddenly he was looking down, and centered in his vision was the basin which he had used to wash. It was a handsome thing made of heavy ceramic, and it had been decorated in a pattern of birds, a mesmerizing tessellation of flying wings and bright beady eyes swarming over the inner surface of the blue-painted bowl of the sky. It had been a garish, gaudy thing, but tonight in the vague and hazy moonlight it was half-obscured with dark, ruby liquid. The surface of the wash-water gleamed unbroken like polished stone, and Jonah’s eyes rolled white at the edges like a terrified horse’s with a sudden dreadful certainty. He knew the water was cold, that it would be thick with his own blood; he knew it would taste like wet copper; knew without knowing why that it would fill his belly with cramps if he took in the great icy volume of it--and yet he was powerless to resist as the wrench of abrupt and undeniable need took hold. 

His white-knuckled, trembling hands grasped the edges of the bowl, rim tucked hard and cold in the hollow in the soft base of his thumbs, fingers splayed white and protesting against the belly of the bowl. It was easy now--too easy-- to lift the heavy weight of ceramic and water combined as he raised it to his lips, set it against the seam of them. He tried to pinch them shut as he felt the water lap against them, tried to stop himself, but could not--his mouth opened, and the water poured in heavy over his tongue, slopping down his chin in thick red-tinted rivulets.

He had been right. The water was frigid in a way he had not felt it to be on his skin--it was ice-pick cold and burned like fire to swallow, and yet he could not stop himself as his mouth filled with it. It tasted like metal and flesh, like something ancient and forgotten, and yet the sips and swallows and draughts turned into great drowning gouts of it as he pulled it over teeth and tongue and throat and swallowed, over and over again. Tears were streaking his cheeks, each too-large gulp stretching and aching and hurting all the way down, and yet, if he did not swallow he would fill his lungs with it instead, and his hands tipped the bowl up and up and _up_ and it felt like _forever_ before the flow slackened, before the last cold rusty drops drained down into his waiting mouth. Only then, nerveless, would his fingers let go. The now-empty bowl crashed back down onto the table so hard the rim cracked, splintering one half of a painted bird away from the rest of its body. The ceramic fragment bounced, and a moment later lay still, the painted unreal eyes rolled uselessly toward the ceiling in mournful and idiotic puzzlement. 

Jonah’s hands dropped to his water-swollen belly, and he was certain for a long few moments he would be sick. He panted, and a low whine issued forth from his throat as he hunched over the bowl, feeling his stomach cramp and twist and writhe. It had been hollow, empty, dry as a rattling gourd, and now it was filled to the neck with bloody water; he thought he could feel it sloshing at the level of his back teeth, and he swallowed uneasily. A look down at himself gave him a nasty jolt at the sight of his belly, which had been soft but mostly flat before, rounded out now and drum-head firm with the pressure of the fluid inside. He stood there for long moments, appalled, and then out of the misery, Jonah felt the strangest sensation of _peace_ begin to dawn.

It welled up out of his belly, overtaking him, suffusing his body with the most peculiar feeling of involuntary satisfaction. It was a shallow feeling, but incomprehensibly broad, and beneath it he could feel himself shivering convulsively as the cold liquid that filled his belly sat like a stone at the core of him, stealing what scant warmth remained to him into itself greedily. As it stole his heat, though, Jonah could feel the liquid beginning to leach out into him too, a slow capillary action like a plant’s network of roots drawing nourishment up from the soil, moistening half-starved tissues and thinning the half-gelled blood that remained in his veins, quickening the bored and desultory pumping of his heart. 

It was not an active process, but as it progressed, he became strangely aware how deeply dry he had been. How long had he been hovering there between life and death, too proud to die and too hurt to shrug it off? And why had no one come to check on him? Jonah did not receive many visitors at home, certainly, but the few he did were faithful and trusted: Jonathan might have come to see him, he thought waspishly, his concern couched in a physician’s duty if nothing else. What if he had taken a fever? 

And then, even if Fanshawe’s concerns were elsewhere, then certainly Barnabas ought to have come. Often enough Jonah could not chase the man away from his door even if he had wanted to; for Bennett to have stayed away and left him to his own devices so long, he must have either said something wretched to him—which he could not recall doing; their last parting in his memory had been sweet enough—or something else had happened.

And, his mind supplied with a treacherous whisper, what of the man that had spilled his life out on the bed, left Jonah stranded in this odd twilight existence, pale and strange in the shadows of the night? What of him, then? He must have been someone close, someone trusted, for him to have had the opportunity to catch Jonah wrong-footed, naked and alone in his bedroom, so who was he? And why, when Jonah tried to turn back the pages of his mind’s usually-excellent ledger, could he not see anything of that night but darkness, as if someone had upended an inkwell over the pages and left them to dry? It was more than a little irritating, but Jonah supposed he had time to figure out the mystery, now.

The more the blood-and-water feeding filtered out into his body, the quicker it moved, and soon enough Jonah found himself feeling light, effortless, as if he could have run all the way to London and back without breaking a sweat, but he had an idea that this wouldn’t last long. It mustn’t, since it was all water and his own blood, but with this much energy bubbling away madly in his chest, it would be easy to make a fool of himself.

And then, soft and sudden, the sound of a knock came at the door below.

Jonah’s head snapped to the side, and he felt every ounce of his attention and focus sharpen down into a knife-keen point. His pupils drew down to dark pinpricks in the glass-green of his irises, and in the dimness he felt suddenly predatory, the urge undeniably strong to listen, to watch, to _taste_ —

Wrapping himself in only a robe, he left the grim, stinking den that had become of his bedchamber with some measure of relief, closing the door behind him. The lure of someone at the door was impossible to resist, and he moved like a man in a dream, movements at once knife-sharp and quick, and somehow lagging behind, as if he could see himself from outside and watch the trails of them, ghostly and dragging. As he rounded the corner from the narrow high steps to the door, he could hear the quiet sounds of the man behind it: he was clearing his throat, shuffling his booted feet in nerves. Why was he nervous? What had the man at the door to fear, Jonah thought, and then he felt laughter bubbling up in his chest.

The man had _Jonah_ to fear, he supposed.

Jonah could smell him--faint cologne, something with lavender and oakmoss, overlaid over scrubbed-clean man; the scent of laundry, the faintest pong of whiskey beneath for courage. It was Barnabas, and no doubting it, not even through the etched glass window of the townhouse. Jonah’s image of the man was nearly letter-perfect to what he saw when he turned the lock, and opened the door.

There stood Barnabas Bennett, tall, conciliatory in the way he had only ever seen this particular man--his head was slightly ducked as if he were ashamed of the way his dark waves and curls of hair would brush the top lintel of Jonah’s door, the broad athletic shoulders tucked inward as if he would apologize for taking up space. He held his hat in his hands, and was worrying the fine felt brim of it, curling it and uncurling it in his long fingers. His expression of anxiety had pleated his dark, fine brows together in the center above his deep-set honey-brown eyes, and Jonah was momentarily possessed with the desire to throttle the man, to sink his thin white fingers in underneath the neat cravat and hopelessly dishevel the starched white fabric, to dismay the fine mobile features and full lips into a round O of gasping horror--and yet he did not. 

“Jonah!” came Barnabas’ voice, and the sudden jolly hope in it made the malice curdle in Jonah’s belly until he felt small and cruel and uncharitable for having thought so. “Oh, am I glad to see you! You’ve been so quiet!”

“A sickness,” Jonah lied, as cool and smooth as if butter might not melt on his tongue, and gave a quicksilver smile, a sickle of bright white teeth and nothing more as he stepped back, tucking himself behind the door as he gestured for Barnabas to enter. Suddenly it was very important that the man come inside, that Jonah close the door behind him and drive the bolt home, and not only for the reasons of Jonah’s tenderest secrets--it was something else below that, something dark and whispering and quiet, a steady-soft voice that did not insist so much as imply. It _persuaded_. 

“I’ve been running a fever and purging my guts, so if it’s all the same to you, I’ll not take you upstairs tonight.” Jonah managed a droll tone despite the aching rawness of his throat. “I’ve even sent the housekeeper home for fear of it being catching. But I’m quite all right now.” Why did his shoulders feel ratcheted so tight in their sockets? Why the straining need, like a spirited horse at the bit, chomping and stamping, to draw Bennett inside, to press his body against the door, to disarray the cravat that was so neatly tied—

But if Barnabas felt Jonah’s tension, he made no sign of it, only stepped inside and let Jonah close the door. He made no mention when Jonah set the bolts, either. “You do look pale as paper, poppet,” Barnabas pattered softly, “and I’m surprised you haven’t caught your death with this drafty place so cold! Why, if I didn’t know better I’d say you hadn’t had a fire in days--” He fell into step behind Jonah, making no mention of his state of _deshabille_ , as Jonah let the way to the parlor. 

The room was not large—nothing about the townhouse was large, really, save the luxury of Jonah’s bed—and it was wallpapered in a crawling floral that always made Jonah think of old women taking weak tea and gossip. He liked it for that reason, but tonight the patterns climbing the walls looked faintly insectile in the moonlit gloom, vaguely threatening, and he drew his arms up to cross above his chest, and he felt himself shivering. Whether the chill was real or not, he could not have told you, but still he was grateful as Barnabas took the tinderbox down and laid fresh wood in the hearth, and struck up a fire with expert hands, coaxing a spark from flint and steel into the curled and ashen tinder, and then transferring this flame to the wood.

Jonah moved to sit on a low sofa, one leg tucked up under him, and he watched Barnabas’ broad back as the man worked energetically at lighting the fire. When the well-seasoned log caught with the first yellow licks of flame, Jonah watched the light build until it had made a fine golden halo, catching sparks and picking out individual hairs from Barnabas’ curls in gold. Finally, Barnabas leaned back onto his heels, taking a half-crouched step back, and dusted his hands off with a triumphant hum. 

“There,” he said, looking back at Jonah—was he looking for praise? Jonah rather thought he might be—“that ought to banish some of this damned chill. It’s too cold for a man to think in here. I’m surprised you haven’t got icicles in places nobody wants them!” He was joking, in fine spirits with relief, and that strange and detached little voice in Jonah’s head remarked distantly that it was a shame, in fact, that Barnabas’ relief ought to be so short-lived.

“Come up,” Jonah heard himself saying—why did his voice sound so small and plaintive in his own ears? “Sit next to me, Barnabas, I’m so cold.” He had no business sounding like that, he thought with some consternation. No business at all sounding like someone’s victim, though perhaps he was whether he liked it or not, with the scene of his own murder still strangely fresh only a flight of stairs away. Of course, Barnabas came when called, and the gallant fool even slipped his coat off, solicitously draping the body-warmed fabric around Jonah’s shoulders, and it felt good. 

Lavender-and-oakmoss, he thought pointlessly, flower-and-musk, sweet and warm and dry, like Barnabas. Like the feel of the man’s leg pressed hip-to-knee against Jonah’s own, the feel of the shirtsleeve-clad arm around his back and the big puppy-paw of a hand chafing warmth into him through the fine wool of the coat. A fragrance as light and uncomplicated as the man himself, a scent for a man who might, if asked, draw Jonah closer to smell the more complex, human scent of flesh below—who might even, without too much of a fuss, wrap him up securely in arms that did not question or demand, only gave without reserve. Jonah thought, and found with a rich and secret feeling that was half shame and half arousal, that he might even be able to hear the singing, if he listened close, of Barnabas’ blood beneath the skin in the places where it was closest to the surface, the warm and liquid rush of it at temple and throat and wrist and groin.

“Is that better?” Barnabas was asking, and Jonah blinked his eyes rapidly, like a man awakening from a dream. He was still shivering, and as the fire’s heat began to slowly grow, Jonah did not think it was from cold, not when Barnabas’ body was only moderately warm against him as a point of comparison. No, the shiver was from somewhere further down, somewhere deeper in the meat of him, where that black and squirming thing he had expected to see in the mirror had taken up residence. It was a tremble he had seen before, in a man who had become direly dependent upon laudanum—a man whose haunted, wet eyes seemed big as dinner plates in his thin white face. 

It was a terrible fate, Jonah thought with a dull sort of horror, a man raving and weeping for oblivion, but he did not think he himself craved the cold, bitter nastiness of opium. He rather thought instead that it was something hotter he needed, something thicker, more nourishing, which might carry with it a satisfaction and a fullness that his own cold, curdled blood in water might not, and a fresh pang of hunger started in his belly.

The sensation writhed there, somewhere at the bottom of his stomach, and as it twisted, Jonah felt it shift, change, morph—and suddenly, it melted through him and settled deeper down into the cradle of his hips. Hunger-and-lust, he told himself, and it twisted up with the senseless singsong chant he had begun before. Hunger-and-lust, lavender-and-oakmoss, blood-and-yearning. He wanted the taste of that living warmth with a suddenness that felt almost nauseating, and he did not wait for Barnabas to ask again, only turned and climbed into Barnabas’ lap with an airless little sound of need.

He was straddling Barnabas’ lap, now, his legs spread, knees on either side of Barnabas’, and Barnabas was making a sound of utter bafflement. “Magnus,” he tried, and then, “Jonah,” in a tone of cautious placation, “are you quite all right? You’ve been ill, perhaps we ought not to stir your blood back up.” 

But Jonah was not listening. He was driven not by conscious decision but by that dark, quiet, so-reasonable persuasion; his pupils were widened, unfocused as though a fog had drifted across the broad bright face of his thinking, and his hands were sliding up Barnabas’ front. Through the fine white cambric of his shirt Jonah could feel the heat of his skin, the few crisp hairs that trailed down over his breastbone, the thin layer of fat, and below it, the strong, kind, foolish heart, suddenly tripping along with surprise. There was again the same odd feeling of  _ disconnection _ , and Jonah became aware again, like a man raising a mossy stone in the field, that there was some dark and whispering thing beneath, recoiling—

_ Mine _ , it said, and Jonah wanted to stop cold, but his hands were moving without his permission now, automatic, with the same inexorable, tidal force of moon and sea. Barnabas was watching him, white visible all around the golden irises of his eyes and heightened color beneath the sun-browned olive of his cheeks, his lips pinched into a trembling line of concern—but Jonah knew the man wouldn’t stop him, not when he couldn’t stop himself. His fingers hooked into the knot of Barnabas’ cravat, and he was working the folds of snow-white fabric with dispassionate skill. He felt so cold, and Barnabas was so  _ warm _ , Jonah thought with a fresh shudder. His curls were quivering, too, and Barnabas raised those long-fingered hands to stroke Jonah’s wet hair back from his brow. 

“Whatever you need,” Barnabas said softly, “I’m here for you. Make yourself comfortable.” Jonah could feel the tension running out of Barnabas, the long lines of the man’s body relaxing, and he wanted to scream like harpstrings wound too tight. He felt as if he were separated from his actions by a glass pane, his palms pressed to it and begging to push through. Barnabas loved him, of that Jonah had no doubt, and he meant it when he said he was here for Jonah’s comfort, though he had perhaps not intended to find himself under the warm weight of Jonah’s body tonight. He almost certainly had not expected Jonah naked, Jonah smelling faintly of blood, trembling with a chill that had little to do with the temperature of his skin.

“I’m alive,” Jonah heard himself saying as if from a distance, somewhere above his body and slightly to the left, and he had never hated the sound of his own voice before, but tonight it was thick, husky, and querulous in a way he associated with old men and frightened women, of which he was neither. His body arched, pressed against Barnabas, a wealth of lavish, freckled flesh, the spread of his straddling legs strained across the breadth of Barnabas’ lap, and he leaned the softness of himself against Barnabas’ front in a motion designed to inflame the senses, to remind Barnabas of the fundamental differences in their anatomy as he parted the neck of Barnabas’ shirt. His lips found Barnabas’ skin, and he whispered against it, “I’m alive, Barnabas; let me celebrate it with you. Remind me how sweet it can be.” 

This close, with the strange acuteness of his senses, he was enveloped in  _ lavender-and-oakmoss _ , in the fine glints of dark hairs he could still see fresh-shaved flush to Barnabas’ skin. Barnabas had cut himself shaving, and Jonah could see the thin slit of scarlet scabbed neatly in the shadow of his jaw. He could not resist tipping his head up to press a kiss to it, then a curl of tongue, tasting salt skin and, faint, the blood beneath.

That strange shadowy creature beneath his own will wanted very much for Jonah to tongue into it, to worry the fragile scab loose with lips and teeth and tonguetip, to press into the razor-cut. It wanted him to widen it, to deepen it, tear the flesh until fresh blood spread hot and vital across the dry and needful valley of his tongue, but Jonah did not give in to this temptation. It would have been at once too easy to give in, and too hard to accomplish what his body so dearly craved, so instead he simply kissed hungrily at Barnabas, wringing a sound from the man’s throat that was very like a whimper, and that was a delight. It spurred Jonah’s lagging arousal into a warm, wet conflagration between his legs. 

“Let me taste you,” Jonah whispered against Barnabas’ tripping pulse, and all Barnabas could do was nod, a stiff little uncertain jerk of his head, his hands falling first on Jonah’s thighs, feeling the cold smoothness of his skin, and then sliding up, fingers slipping under the hems of Jonah’s robe.

“You’re still so cold,” Barnabas protested softly after a moment, and Jonah laughed, hearing the sound of it bell-bright and strangely artificial in his own ears. Barnabas’ hands were curving back, gentle and slow, rubbing as if by doing so he might drive a modicum of his own warmth into Jonah’s tender flesh, chafing callused fingers and palms against his hips and thighs. “Whatever you need, Jonah—”

Jonah’s arms wrapped softly around Barnabas’ shoulders, and he applied lips and teeth to the place where Barnabas’ pulse beat there in the hollow of his throat. “Whatever I need?” he asked, with a tone in his voice of the cat who’s trapped the canary, light and playful. “That’s a dangerous thing to offer a man, Barnabas!” Beneath him, against him, he could feel Barnabas reacting to the cool, light presence of him; there was living, throbbing heat between those sturdy thighs, and his mouth watered for it in a way that Jonah was unfamiliar with: he was not a man who preferred fellatio over other entertainments, but tonight the thought of that vital, hot piece of Barnabas sheathed in his mouth and throat made his teeth snap closed instinctively with hunger, scraping thin red welts on Barnabas’ throat and making the man jump. His mouth ran with saliva, alive with imagination and need.

“I mean it, Jonah,” Barnabas babbled with breathless earnestness, voice full of distracted affection, “I have ever been your creature, and will continue to be…” But Jonah’s focus was pinned on one thing, now, elliptically pivoting in on itself each time he became distracted, spiraling inexorably toward hunger and need, sharp as a knife in the belly. He shifted, writhed, and made space for himself between Barnabas’ thighs, moving to puddle there on the floor between them. Barnabas looked down at him dazed and only half-comprehending—but that did not seem to have stopped his body’s response. Jonah could plainly see, pressed against the front of his trousers, the outline of Barnabas’ arousal. He felt as smug as a cat, leaning in to press his face against the firm, warm heat of Barnabas’ groin, nuzzling at the left-curved ridge of cock through its concealing fabric, single-minded—and if he had not been so absorbed, he would have noticed the noose of the compulsion slip shut around his neck, pull inescapably tight.

Whatever Barnabas said seemed faraway now, irrelevant, as Jonah opened his mouth and tipped his head, mouthing firmly at the cloth-covered cock as his hands rose to work the buttons that held the fall-front closed. To Jonah, the breathless little sound of Barnabas’ hapless arousal sounded distant, like a man hearing words from yards underwater, and he did not have to struggle with the buttons long before he had his prize exposed, the saliva-dampened fabric falling away from it.

Exposed, Barnabas’ cock jerked prettily in the warming air. He was not a large man, and Jonah had often remarked on it with a singsong sort of playful derision—perfect for stuffing into his mouth soft, to feel the warm vulnerability of it grow and fill out until it became something like warm silk wrapped around steel, and even so it would not be so large that it choked Jonah. It would fill his mouth and part of his throat in the most luscious and satisfying way, he thought with a hungry anticipation, but the sweet moment of softness and vulnerability had passed, and it throbbed, already well on its way to full erection. A pretty bead of Barnabas’ slick glistened at the tip, pooled in the slit there and gleaming in the watery firelight, tinged with a merry and dancing scarlet, the exact shade of blood—and he wanted it, leaned forward and took it into the wet of his mouth, feeling Barnabas startle at the chill of his flesh as he took it from tip to root and buried his nose in the nest of curls at the base of him—

Barnabas’ hands came forward, tangled in Jonah’s wet curls, and there was a peculiar sensation of push-and-pull, as if he were not sure whether he ought to push Jonah back and off him, or pull him closer, grind the length of him desperately into that greedy swallowing throat. Instead he simply gripped Jonah’s hair achingly tight, hands trembling, and made a sound like a trapped animal way down in his throat, like a man wounded mortally. 

And then, bewilderingly, Jonah felt a sweet, soporific ripple of darkness begin to roll over and through his head. At first it was light, diaphanous as a single layer of silk, and he made a breathless little sound through his mouthful, feeling the subtle buck and hitch of Barnabas moving beneath him. Something was wrong, Jonah was able to think as if through a sticky haze—something had gone deeply wrong, and he could not quite understand what, but although he wanted to he could not alter its course. The hot salt-sweet throb of cock on his tongue, the pulse against his lips, and Jonah’s heart was filled with a sudden wash of terror. 

He was a self-willed man, always, and he could hear through a deepening layer of darkness his own lewd moan, the slick squelch of his mouth on Barnabas’ arousal. His body was moving, and he could not stop it, and this was horrifying to him on a level more fundamental than anything else that had happened thus far—but that writhing, dark thing in his chest had a grasp on Jonah so tight he thought he would have to die again to escape it, even as his body carried on the rhythms of sucking Barnabas with greedy earnestness. His head bobbed, and from behind himself, he watched that stiff prick slide in and out of his mouth, watched the way Barnabas reacted in a trembling, shivering rush of hips hitching and hands clenching and his belly flexed taut.

“Please, Jonah,” Barnabas begged, as Jonah ruthlessly took him into his throat, swallowed him again and again with breathless, airless languor, “please, if you torment me I will finish, and I won’t be able to please you—“ Somewhere behind that dark and drifting iron curtain of compulsion, Jonah felt that same curdled, impotent, nasty spite as he had before, standing in the foyer and thinking wretched thoughts about Barnabas. The man did not deserve his ire, but his presence had been the catalyst for this, and Jonah felt himself incandescently furious, tasting the salt of Barnabas’ dripping fluids filling his mouth and running like wine down his throat as he suckled. The man’s reactions were so familiar as to be predictable, and Jonah wanted to laugh, wanted to shriek and howl and tear his hair. It was the sweetest violation he could think of, and it was this thought, cruel and cold and tenderly brutal, that swept aside the compulsion for a moment.

He felt it lift with a sense of triumph so broad and deep it was almost sexual, and in control of his own body again he drove his mouth down to the base of Barnabas’ cock, again and again, setting a punishing rhythm. He was savagely angry, but Barnabas was so close, and the man had not earned his ire; he was faithful as a hound, and whatever silent, dry voice was whispering in his ears and seizing his hands had nothing to do with Barnabas, did it? Still, the act of pleasuring Barnabas had deepened the hot, sweet throbbing ache of arousal between Jonah’s thighs, and he felt the drip of his own chilly slick etching wet riverbeds down the inside of one leg. Barnabas’ body was drawing taut, the tension of hip and thigh telling Jonah all he needed to know even if he could not hear Barnabas’ convulsive little cry of pleasure.

The rush of seed that filled Jonah’s mouth startled him with its sudden volume and enthusiasm, and he pulled back with a protesting noise. The second jet spattered across his lips and chin, and the third, less-voluminous, dribbled stickily down the sides of his shuddering, flagging cock, and Barnabas was babbling muzzy, sweet praises, stroking Jonah’s hair with hands that trembled and calling him  _ angel _ . 

But Jonah was beyond hearing this obscene absurdity, his senses gone again beneath that heavy, dark curtain, betrayed by his own arousal. He loved Barnabas, the soft and simple ease of being with him, the secrets he had laid in the man’s gentle and guileless hands, the body that was made, it seemed, for an unchallenging and uncomplicated pleasure. He loved the unstinting, generous, fierce sweetness of him, and he became aware as he thought them that these sentiments were not all his own. They were echoed and amplified in his head until they took up all the space there, as if someone had hollowed a great church-bell out of his skull and the word  _ love _ was a clapper to make it ring.

He was licking up the mess of Barnabas’ spending, following the drops of it down that softening length, finding the sticky-salty treasures of them in the tender folds of skin, in the musk-sweet hollow between thigh and hip, and it was in this place that Jonah felt the rung-bell thunderstruck sensation happen again behind his eyes, like a man dazzled. Barnabas’ heart was thundering, and the sound of his pulse was like a song in the broad vessel there in the space between thigh and hip. 

Jonah’s senses narrowed again— _ lavender-and-oakmoss _ , he thought giddily, the perfume of a man who  _ loves you _ , and yet there was nothing he could do to stop himself as saliva thickened in his mouth, bathing teeth that suddenly felt too long, too sharp against his lips. There was nothing he could do against the compulsion, crushing him against the invisible but unyielding glass between  _ will _ and  _ action _ , and it demanded blood in that black and whispering silence. It was no longer a suggestion but a requirement, a biological imperative as urgent as breathing had been. Jonah had never done it, but he knew just what it would feel like for his teeth to sink into that tender hot flesh, and powerlessly he felt his resistance subsumed beneath the ponderous immensity of  _ need _ and  _ blood _ .

Teeth grown predator-sharp found that fragrant fine-furred hollow where the pulse beat, and suddenly Barnabas’ pleasured murmurs turned to a cry that was half-shriek, panic like alarm klaxons in Jonah’s ears, and yet the inside of his head was blessedly, emptily silent as blood came pouring out of Barnabas like a scarlet tide, rich and steaming. It was a feast for a king, a sacrificial lamb with a vein opened to pour out the fine hot wine of its living to an absent god. Barnabas’ hands were in his hair and pulling, but the pain was distant and faint in comparison to the hot rush of copper-sweet blood pouring out of Barnabas into his mouth. 

There was no pain this time as he drank, no ice-pick misery as his body accommodated the volume, and Jonah sealed his lips around the wound and gave suckle in an ecstasy of feasting. He could taste Barnabas’ terror in it, tuned to a dog’s-ear pitch, and he could taste the lingering pleasure too, thick and syrupy like honey, and he thought—but could not be sure—that he could also taste the man’s love. It was a taste like liquor, an intoxicant that set sparks dancing behind his closed lids. Barnabas tasted like hearthfires, like the golden hour between afternoon and evening, like the indefinable, ephemeral knowledge that comes on the last day of winter that all the green growing things that will come are already putting out their tender roots and daring to grow without the promise of sunshine, trusting it will come. Barnabas’ blood in his belly felt like he had swallowed the fecund, humid sweetness of spring, and Jonah found his hand between his thighs without knowing he had put it there. His fingers were stuffed into the dripping place that was the center of his desire, his palm pressed tight against his aching cock, and when it came the orgasm shattered his senses like the mirror-glass, left him looking up at himself from the floor in a thousand shards, blinking and muzzy and disjointed.

Before too long Barnabas’ hands stopped pulling at Jonah’s curls, and part of Jonah startled up and out of a reverie that in itself was like the dreams of laudanum, as he had feared. The sounds escaping Barnabas now were breathless, airless, the tidal gasps of a dying man, and Jonah disengaged from the bloody wound he had bitten into the meat of Barnabas’ thigh. It was not a pretty thing, but it was hardly the savaging his own throat had received, he found himself thinking with small and petty pride. Barnabas’ leg was trembling and cold, and there was a feeling in Jonah’s belly like he had hollowed out the sun. He looked up, and set his gaze on Barnabas’ face, finding it white beneath the good tan, finding great blue smudges beneath the man’s unfocused and rolling eyes. Barnabas was fighting to stay awake, but when Jonah rose to his feet, those fixed pupils turned to him. There was no accusation there, only a dull and hazy confusion, an unanswered question.

Jonah was not capable of giving it an answer, but the compulsion had not finished with him yet. He licked the last of the blood from his lips and chin with a tongue that felt like a firebrand, and then he climbed up into Barnabas’ lap again as he had before. One knee settled daintily to each side of Barnabas’ slack thighs, and he set his hands on Barnabas’ cheeks, feeling the living warmth in his fingers and palms with an almost unbearable delirium of the senses. The dark head stopped lolling, and Jonah watched as the sweet familiar lips formed his name, and then bit deeply into his own tongue.

The pain of it was hot and immediate, and Jonah moaned with sick pleasure at the bright,  _ real _ feeling of it. Blood welled into his mouth, and he laughed with sheer joy. “If you love me,” he said with a voice almost quivering with that spring joy, thick dark fluid spilling down his chin, “then take what I give you!” And he covered Barnabas’ mouth with his own.

Blood spilled from his wounded tongue into Barnabas’ mouth, and for a moment Jonah was balanced on the point of his own horror: had he waited too late? Was Barnabas too weak? But there came a thick, dry, clicking swallowing sound from Barnabas’ throat as it worked clumsily, and then another, and he could feel the first cautious pull of Barnabas’ mouth on his own. Indulgently he let Barnabas suck his tongue from the safe cavern of his own mouth and into the cool and ashen wet of Barnabas’. He felt the suckling grow from the feeble and uncoordinated efforts of a dying man to something more sure, something more aware. The flow began to slack for a moment, and then there came again the vivid benediction of agony as Barnabas’ blunt teeth cut into the soft flesh of his lower lip, opened a fresh wound there from which he might continue nursing. 

Still, even though Barnabas fed on him, suckled blood from him, Jonah felt no lessening of that lucid feeling of hearthfire and spring sunshine in the cavern of his chest and belly. He did not think he could have ever forgotten it, anyway, not when his skin felt warm and flushed and tingling-sensitive in every extremity, as if he had sat too long in a hot bath. He was aware distantly that Barnabas was weeping, hot tears streaking the man’s cheeks, and that Barnabas’ hands had risen and his arms were wrapped around Jonah with crushing and terrifying force, but as Barnabas’ mouth disengaged from Jonah’s, he felt that there was no breath in the broad chest. The great faithful heart was silent and still, and Barnabas was staring at him now with a look of mingled terror and adoration, the unsettlingly pretty bow of his lips stained scarlet as if Jonah had painted them with some forbidden cosmetic. His eyes were open wide and unseeing, golden-brown with dark motes of pupil lost in their depths, like a honey sea with a small dark man drowning alone at its center.

Then they rolled up into his head. Barnabas sagged like a puppet with his strings cut, and slept. The compulsion was silent then, and Jonah was free to move again, free to enact his will, but he found he had no more strength to do so. With the heat of the fire crackling merrily in the grate, and the small inner sun of Barnabas’ living blood in his belly, Jonah laid his curly bright head on Barnabas’ broad shoulder, slid his arms around his neck with the trust of a child, and slipped after him into dreaming.


End file.
